I don't have responsibility for what the rest of the world does. I have responsibility for what my nation and my tax dollars do. That's why our nation should have transparency, because we, as the people, are responsible for what it does. What you're expressing is relativism at it's worst. I'm also heavily opposed to kids being murdered because they're grandparents spoke out against the Taliban, but what does that have to do with this video shot in Iraq? It doesn't matter how evil your neighbors are. That doesn't excuse you from committing murder. The U.S. military IS committing murder, no matter if you call it collateral damage, soft targets, etc.. You can create some moral web of justification surrounding civilian deaths, but when it comes down to it, there's no excuse. We have created more death, disease, and chaos in Iraq than Saddam would have ever dreamed of. Two wrongs don't make a right.
You could have tried to rebuild Germany without crippling sanctions, avoiding the desperation and power vacuum necessary for an evil tyrant to rise to power. Or just put political pressure on Germany to not accept fascism as a legitimate form of government, and forbid others from investing in such a horrible idea financially. Or support the main political opponents at the time, the communists. Or seize control of the budding military apparatus of the state and dismantle it before rearmament had taken place. Or not appease Hitler when he violated the Versailles treaty. The list goes on. None of these needed a world war.
First off, your original list doesn't quite make sense. Force didn't/hasn't removed several people on your list, many historically famous butchers are conveniently missing (Americans?, Royalty?, the Church?), and in the case of Castro and the U.S.S.R., the threat of force nearly ended the world.
Despite all that, I do agree that force is sometimes necessary to stop more suffering. However, it's rarely the case that war couldn't have been prevented beforehand through a bit of moral thinking. Obviously, that means no military aid to nations with a bad track record, such as Israel or Colombia. This also means you don't exploit the rest of the world, creating a perfect vacuum for a warlord to rise to power. The Vietnam war was mainly caused by the grueling poverty imposed by French imperialism, for example. And you certainly don't shake hands with those warlords once they gain command. We could make a similar list here, rivaling yours, the difference being of course that we are partially responsible for the suffering caused by these monsters through our aid and military support. Often these support mechanisms directly cause the exact type of dictator you are using as justification of war, taking the Taliban, Hussein, Indonesia, and Batista, for example. Perhaps some of these dictatorial regimes could be avoided by more carefully choosing our relationships with the rest of the world. Simply boiling down foreign policy to "useless talking" and "invasion" is a gross oversimplification that makes you sound like a warmongering idiot.
The best way to avoid war is to not help cause it in the first place. For example, let's take the war in Iraq. Had we not supported Saddam militarily throughout the eighties, he wouldn't have had the capacity to to invade another country. We could have prevented all of this by simply not selling arms to a dictator. The U.S. not only sold Saddam weapons, but they also helped Saddam develop his chemical and biological weapons programs in their crusade against Iran. I would assume that to someone who expresses so much reverence for freedom, you would understand the concept of not aiding those who legally despise it, i.e. dictators. Explain to me then, why Saddam was a former ally? The U.S. was pretty quiet when Saddam was using chemical weapons on his own people and the Iranians, despite the fact that it is explicitly forbidden internationally as a war crime. We certainly knew about it, so where was the outrage then? After the first war Bush I suggested that the Iraqi people overthrow Saddam, but in an ironic twist of fate we gave absolutely no aid to the Iraqi people to achieve such a task, after heavily funding the mess in the first place through Saddam. Instead of helping the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam, we punished them with brutal sanctions we knew would do nothing to the Iraqi elite, but would have horrible consequences for the rest of Iraq. When half a million Iraqi children died due to sanctions, the fact that most of Iraq's water treatment facilities were intentionally destroyed, and there was a dramatic increase in infectious disease, people like you turn around and blame Saddam! Before you go off about the Oil for Food program, keep in mind that is wasn't initiated until 1996 - by which time the damage was done. The Pentagon admitted that one of their goals in the first Gulf war was to disable Iraqi society at large, rather than concentrate solely on military targets. They have also admitted that one of their goals was to make living conditions so unbearable to the Iraqis that they would overthrow Saddam out of desperation. In addition to destroying Iraq's underlying infrastructure, the U.S. fought to keep humanitarian goods, which had no military use, out of Iraq. Sounds pretty fucking sick and sadistic to me. If this is how you bring "democracy" to the rest of the world, you can definitely count me out. Explain to me again how this use of force was supposed to prevent human suffering and uphold freedom?
The aquarium is actually a separate business that co-occupies the space with the City Museum, as is the thrift store. That's why you have to pay a separate admission price to get into the aquarium, and you actually don't have to pay any admission if you say you're just going to the thrift store...
I've been to the City Museum several times, and I must say there is really no other place like it on earth. If anyone finds the museum lacking in content, I'd have to say that you're missing the point. The CM is all about interaction; you're not meant to just see everything in the plain sense, you're meant to climb, explore, and seek out the little hidden places tucked away all over the place. Almost everything about the place is entirely free-form, and that's part of the thrill. If you find that the place only satisfies curiosity for about an hour, well then I bet you're probably a pretty boring person that's way too grown up for their own good.
Meanwhile, it's so refreshing to see a place disregard all of the idiot tags we're so used to seeing everyday. Given that 99.999% of the population doesn't need to be told not to do stupid things, it's really that tiny fraction of people that makes everything always suck. The ones that make you wonder who the fuck would be stupid enough to eat the silicate pellet packs you find in new shoes, but also have the ability to read. The only place remotely similar to the CM where I live is so padded, safe, and banal by comparison. Yes, there is the risk of getting hurt in the CM, but the same thing is often true of places kids play. Even a simple jungle gym can result in a broken bone (as it did with me in the 3rd grade), but the point is to not generate boring people by sacrificing a fun life for complete and utter safety. Learning how to deal with potentially dangerous environments, yet still enjoy yourself, should be a crucial part of any kids upbringing. You have to use common sense to NOT INTENTIONALLY PUT YOUR FINGERS OR BODY IN A GIGANTIC MOVING METAL DEVICE. You shouldn't need a sign explaining why this is a bad idea. Nowhere in the CM will you find spots where good old fashioned common sense will keep you from getting hurt, and at the very least are no more risky that other theme parks/playgrounds.
Major advances have been made in real-time rendering previews and game engines, but you'll notice the more you actually get your hands on these that they can't currently do anything too complex.
The scenes demoed on their website use simple light sources with what appears to be a little bit of ambient occlusion. It's immediately noticeable that the geometry is low poly, and that the texture maps are procedural and tiled. Impressive for sure to be done in real-time, even though I'm not sure what amazing hardware you'd need to perform such a task, but not quite "cinematic quality" anyways.
. Let's see some real-time full scale global illumination, sub surface scattering, high resolution displacement, convincing reflections and refractions, etc. all done on some complex geometry at a decent resolution with some anti-aliasing before we make such a statement. Even though the bar is being raised for realistic visuals in computer games, that bar is also being raised in CGI for films...
The fact that most of our geniuses of yore tend to be white males is an implicit statement about the political climate of the time. Why weren't there any female or black masters in the classical era of Western music?
The same logic applies to video games, and the generic bald white space marine. While a game may not be intentionally political, that doesn't mean that we can't glean political information about the time and place these games are made.
Digital manipulation using Photoshop and the like is nothing like the studio effects you mention.
Whether you want to admit it or not, you're talking about environmental changes to the subject - lighting, color cast, exposure, etc.., not physical changes. You're not grasping the difference between an illusion, such as painting a room white to make it appear larger, and physical manipulation, such as moving your walls five feet out to increase your square footage.
Everyone expects that a good photographer will capture their subjects in the best light and color, along with manipulating the subject matter to get the best possible facial expression, etc. These are the basic elements of portrait photography, and have been for a long time. It's still a far cry from going in and giving your subject a digital nose job, increasing their bust size, slimming their waist and thighs, and stretching their torso. No amount of bounce lighting is going to achieve those things.
Well I'd say the first thing is that they have names like Microsoft, Nintendo, and EA, and the second thing is that they like to maximize a profit for the risk they take on developing, manufacturing, and marketing a product, but you're probably right. I'm definitely not initiated enough to understand such confusing and arcane subject matter as the logic behind making more of a type of thing that has sold a lot before, and allowing a product to retail through your distribution channel that has a reasonable expectation to sell. I didn't know that big media worked to promote the erudite musings of talented and rugged individuals, regardless of credentials, content, or market forces, not shovel out more of whatever sells the most copies at Wal-Mart, so thanks for clearing that up. I also didn't know that all you need to "level the playing field", as an indie games developer, is a good idea, magical "free time and money", and to get your shitty no-budget game posted up in some backwater realm of the internet. Maybe if you're lucky, some naive kid will do your texture work for free because they think it'll look good in their demo reel, or by the time you're sixty all of your hard work will have paid off enough to hire another person onto your team, or actually pay for some advertising. There's no such thing as market manipulation from above or barriers to entry, especially in the console market, right?
I think it's you that doesn't know the first thing about American capitalism and reiterates the same tired idea that all you need to make in this world is a healthy dose of determination, and that the people that don't overcome the inequalities and barriers to education and success dealt to them really only have themselves to blame.
Late response, but you didn't address what I said at all. Perhaps you should before you deem me "full of shit" and yourself "enlightening".
It's not just about women being buxom and curvaceous, but women being allowed to be "unattractive", yet still serve a role in the storyline of a game. Men vital to a story or environment are commonly portrayed as being ugly, while women, even those realistically portrayed physically, are not. Supporting roles, or plot points needing to be fleshed out are disproportionately handled by men, which contributes to the exaggeration of femininity in females due to their rarer occurrence (something that also commonly effects racial stereotypes in the games and media). Almost all of the games you mention contain far more men than women, giving the male sex much more room for variety through raw statistics in addition to male-centric game design.
One single example? Let's take a look at some example from your list a little closer. GTA IV (there are so many ugly men here I don't really need to name them, you're ignoring that Vice City is a perfect example of what you're trying to prove doesn't exist, and almost all the women you encounter, in all of the games, are a different story...), The Orange Box (compare Barney, Dr. Vance, Dr. Kleiner, Dr. Breen, the G-man, and many TF2 characters, to the few important female characters Alyx, Dr. Mossmann, and Chell. Even Valve's realistic portryal of these individuals doesn't mask the fact that the women are undeniably and intentionally more attractive for their age, compared to the men, who are allowed to be ugly for the sake of character. To my knowledge, Half Life 1 didn't contain any female characters, except for those sexy assassin things...), Street Fighter (E. Honda. do I really need to go on?), MGSIV (haven't played this one, but old snake isn't exactly going to win any beauty pagents, along with Psycho Mantis and Revelover Ocelot from the previous games. I do remember a "Sniper Wolf" with huge cleavage, however. Meryl was undeniably calendar girl worthy.), etc, etc. Women are given character AFTER they are established as an attractive human. Your list also excludes many historical big sellers, such as the many, many sports titles (plenty of realistic portrayal of homely men, sorry girls but you're stuck with Dead or Alive beach volleyball), and, yes all of those big selling Mario games. Also important are the countless cookie cutter genre games, whose portrayal of stereotypes are often stronger due to lower, eh, production values. Yes, many of the games you mentioned do contain muscled male stereotypes or attractive men, but they ALSO contain many males that don't fit into those trappings, which was my point. Games have plenty of unattractive men, and very rarely, by comparison, will you see an unattractive woman. This is what leads people to claim that female images are misrepresented in video games.
Finally, I think I'll expound on Samus, because she is the perfect example of what I'm talking about. You've probably played Super Smash Bros Brawl, where one of the playable characters is "Zero Suit Samus", basically Samus without her Power Armor. Lo and behold, we find a curvaceous buxom blond beneath the suit, reassuring us that even though we usually can't see the figure of Samus through her Power Armor, rest assured that she is hot...
I'll admit that RPG are usually a little more friendly towards female bodies that the other genres women are portrayed in, but you're still missing the point. All of the adult females in FFVI are portrayed as being attractive (in supporting art materials as well, I might add), in contrast with plenty of important unattractive male characters throughout the game, including the most powerful character in the game, Kefka. Besides that, have you played any of the FF games recently? Do I really need to remind you that FFXII contained a playboy bunny, complete with stilettos and a thong (even in the snowy mountains), as a main character? Ever hear of a game called FFX-2? Alter
We should never ever as a society condone people that don't "understand the why and wherefore" to have guns, badges, and the authority to beat your ass and get away with it. The fault lies with everyone involved in proportion to their involvement, in any situation in which your right are being removed (by being arrested, for example).
It's called personal responsibility, and you should have it no matter what your job is, or how many guns you're allowed to carry.
Right...care to back any of your "bitching" up with some evidence? Games are absolutely teeming with unchiseled, unattractive men. They take the forms of villians, NPC's, and very often, player characters. Just compare Mario and Peach, for starters. Men are the only sex allowed to have diversity in video games.
Females, even strong females such as Samus Aran or Lara Croft have to be buxom curvacious stereotypes, and at the very least attractive. Can you even name ONE adult female player character off the top of your head that doesn't fit this mold (must be human and not created by the player, sorry)? Alyx Vance comes close, but isn't playable.
Right, so if minority groups just learned more at the public library, they too could be captains of industry! All they have to do first is learn, then they'll automatically get to own the huge media firms that decide what gets published. Amazing!
You're simple, yet elegant, solution has singlehandedly solved centuries of inequality and discrimination. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
Acting within you granted legal rights in not taking an "unassailable moral high ground". This is the first obvious problem, which is that people do not respect the legal status of bikers as traffic. If anything, you're assuming a moral high ground, by not treating fellow transports as equals. You have an impact on those around you as well, including bikers. We don't have a second class status on the road, and you don't get ambulatory priority just because you're in a car. You also have to keep in mind that the vulnerable party here, safety wise, are the bikers. This is why we often ride in ways that slow down traffic and increase our visibility. If you have a problem with bikers acting in ways to ensure their safety, than you really have a problem with the law, which grants equal access to the roads for bikes. As long as we are acting within our legal rights, we're not the ones at fault.
As long as the roads are to be used by everyone with equal right of access, including bikers, you're going to have to gain some patience.
Right...because it's their fault you've decided to have such a shitty drive home and homicidal tendencies? I'm not so sure that the problems here rest with bikers.
So what? Do you have the same indignation at speed bumps and stop signs? I don't bike because I think it's going to save the world, I do it because I prefer the experience to being cooped up in a car.
Nevertheless, for you comparison to be even remotely fair, you'd have to compare the total amount of energy wasted to get a person from point A to point B utilizing both methods of transportation. I'm no physicist, but I'm willing to bet the biker is going to come out on top in most circumstances.
Furthermore, you can easily invert the entire thrust of your argument. Stopping, starting, and traffic are an unavoidable fact of urban transportation. Bikes have an inherent engineering advantage when to remain idle requires little to no energy. It should be obvious, for a variety of reasons, that cars are not the most effective choice for such terrain.
While I wholeheartedly agree with your point, not all homebrew sucks, at least not for the DS...
Check out a program called Colors, which is a simple painting/sketching program which uses the touch interface. To my knowledge, the DS doesn't have this feature otherwise.
The DS is FAR easier to pirate gam...ahem..."run homebrew" for. All you have to do is plug a card into Slot 1 loaded with software. Really, that's it. There is no battery swapping, tiff expoiting crap to deal with. Also, most DS games are relatively tiny, compared to a UMD. Yet the DS has a million awesome games.
Because the PSP can do near PS2 quality games, there is a large onus to up the production value. Bigger budgets mean higher risk, and this is probably the real reason why the PSP is pretty barren.
Ok, do you mind if I shoot you in the head with this nail gun? Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you, I'm only going to change your skull. Also, great job on the ad hominem criticism, because we all know that only perfect people have valid things to say. Sure a lot of environmentalist hippies may have obvious hypocrisies, but you're an apologist, and that is much, much worse. Now that I think about it, I really can't see the difference between the environmental impact of posting on Slashdot and nuking the planet. It's all so clear now thanks to your amazing ontological semantics! Thanks!
You seemed to be missing a vital point so I'll spell it out for you - an argument favoring environmental or ecological initiative a over b due to personal or moral considerations can not immediately be inflated to an argument calling for the dismantling of all technology that effects the planet.
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible that some clean renewable source of energy could be harvested to power our Ipods, but I'll be darned if I can think of it! I guess we might as well stick to building aircraft carriers and mountaintop removal, because it's simply impossible that we could live any other way that the way we do right now, and besides it's not like we're fucking anything up. Just changing it, you know. By the way, how much research do you think a trillion bucks, about the estimated amount pissed down the drain in Iraq, would buy? Fuck it, let's get into that Alaskan wildlife reserve ASAP!
This is really misleading. The development of computer technology has been heavily subsidized by the government. The internet is a notorious example of public subsidy being handed over for private profit.
Even Bell Labs' transistor, the invention of the century, was heavily effected by the protection/subsidy of AT&T from on high. It was only due to the monopoly status AT&T enjoyed that it had the spare cash to maintain Bell Labs, and once AT&T lost this government protection, so too did Bell Labs shift away from it's scientific pursuits to more short term projects.
How exactly you think private companies have the right to charge us through the nose for technology developed either in part or fully by our own tax dollars is beyond me. When you say that "we paid for the R&D", that's more of a reason for it be cheaper for us, not less!
Why would I feel "just as much emotional impact" for tragedy stricken upon strangers? Nothing I said implies this, and you're pushing an extreme view upon me to apologize for a perceived callousness.
A person's emotional attachment to fellow human beings can be anything. People can care very deeply for people they've never met, and people can not give a damn about people they've known their whole life. I don't buy any arguments that claim some innate level of human empathy that serves as a standard upon which to judge yourself. These types of excuses are used notoriously to defend selfish, destructive, and apathetic behavior, and have been all throughout history. When it comes down to it, you are responsible for your own morals, so you only have yourself to blame if you find yourself offended that others see your lack of empathy as disturbing.
If people didn't care deeply for each other, including those that they've never met, we never would have come out of certain dark chapters of our collective history. Slavery is a good example. I'm sure you can think of others.
The implicit assumption behind all of your defense is that people can only really care about those that have a "connection" with them. While you can convince yourself of this, I don't need to have a series of information exchanging encounters with a person to sympathize with them as a fellow human.
If the world really operated this way, we'd certainly be a lot more fucked than we are right now. I would imagine most of us rational self-interested egoists are too busy burying those rogue emotions under paychecks and cheap rhetoric, however.
Right...whenever greed fueled economic catastrophe ruins the working class people will always claim it's their own fault for being too stupid. A lot more people than you think "survive" by doing without and still end up on the street.
Personally, I'd rather do something about the disgusting disparity of wealth and opportunity in our nation than see people stripped to a meager existence. Maybe predatory lending, not homeowner's cellphones, had something to do with this?
Slashdot Mirror
What about video games?
I don't have responsibility for what the rest of the world does. I have responsibility for what my nation and my tax dollars do. That's why our nation should have transparency, because we, as the people, are responsible for what it does. What you're expressing is relativism at it's worst. I'm also heavily opposed to kids being murdered because they're grandparents spoke out against the Taliban, but what does that have to do with this video shot in Iraq? It doesn't matter how evil your neighbors are. That doesn't excuse you from committing murder. The U.S. military IS committing murder, no matter if you call it collateral damage, soft targets, etc.. You can create some moral web of justification surrounding civilian deaths, but when it comes down to it, there's no excuse. We have created more death, disease, and chaos in Iraq than Saddam would have ever dreamed of. Two wrongs don't make a right.
You could have tried to rebuild Germany without crippling sanctions, avoiding the desperation and power vacuum necessary for an evil tyrant to rise to power. Or just put political pressure on Germany to not accept fascism as a legitimate form of government, and forbid others from investing in such a horrible idea financially. Or support the main political opponents at the time, the communists. Or seize control of the budding military apparatus of the state and dismantle it before rearmament had taken place. Or not appease Hitler when he violated the Versailles treaty. The list goes on. None of these needed a world war.
First off, your original list doesn't quite make sense. Force didn't/hasn't removed several people on your list, many historically famous butchers are conveniently missing (Americans?, Royalty?, the Church?), and in the case of Castro and the U.S.S.R., the threat of force nearly ended the world.
Despite all that, I do agree that force is sometimes necessary to stop more suffering. However, it's rarely the case that war couldn't have been prevented beforehand through a bit of moral thinking. Obviously, that means no military aid to nations with a bad track record, such as Israel or Colombia. This also means you don't exploit the rest of the world, creating a perfect vacuum for a warlord to rise to power. The Vietnam war was mainly caused by the grueling poverty imposed by French imperialism, for example. And you certainly don't shake hands with those warlords once they gain command. We could make a similar list here, rivaling yours, the difference being of course that we are partially responsible for the suffering caused by these monsters through our aid and military support. Often these support mechanisms directly cause the exact type of dictator you are using as justification of war, taking the Taliban, Hussein, Indonesia, and Batista, for example. Perhaps some of these dictatorial regimes could be avoided by more carefully choosing our relationships with the rest of the world. Simply boiling down foreign policy to "useless talking" and "invasion" is a gross oversimplification that makes you sound like a warmongering idiot.
The best way to avoid war is to not help cause it in the first place. For example, let's take the war in Iraq. Had we not supported Saddam militarily throughout the eighties, he wouldn't have had the capacity to to invade another country. We could have prevented all of this by simply not selling arms to a dictator. The U.S. not only sold Saddam weapons, but they also helped Saddam develop his chemical and biological weapons programs in their crusade against Iran. I would assume that to someone who expresses so much reverence for freedom, you would understand the concept of not aiding those who legally despise it, i.e. dictators. Explain to me then, why Saddam was a former ally? The U.S. was pretty quiet when Saddam was using chemical weapons on his own people and the Iranians, despite the fact that it is explicitly forbidden internationally as a war crime. We certainly knew about it, so where was the outrage then? After the first war Bush I suggested that the Iraqi people overthrow Saddam, but in an ironic twist of fate we gave absolutely no aid to the Iraqi people to achieve such a task, after heavily funding the mess in the first place through Saddam. Instead of helping the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam, we punished them with brutal sanctions we knew would do nothing to the Iraqi elite, but would have horrible consequences for the rest of Iraq. When half a million Iraqi children died due to sanctions, the fact that most of Iraq's water treatment facilities were intentionally destroyed, and there was a dramatic increase in infectious disease, people like you turn around and blame Saddam! Before you go off about the Oil for Food program, keep in mind that is wasn't initiated until 1996 - by which time the damage was done. The Pentagon admitted that one of their goals in the first Gulf war was to disable Iraqi society at large, rather than concentrate solely on military targets. They have also admitted that one of their goals was to make living conditions so unbearable to the Iraqis that they would overthrow Saddam out of desperation. In addition to destroying Iraq's underlying infrastructure, the U.S. fought to keep humanitarian goods, which had no military use, out of Iraq. Sounds pretty fucking sick and sadistic to me. If this is how you bring "democracy" to the rest of the world, you can definitely count me out. Explain to me again how this use of force was supposed to prevent human suffering and uphold freedom?
The aquarium is actually a separate business that co-occupies the space with the City Museum, as is the thrift store. That's why you have to pay a separate admission price to get into the aquarium, and you actually don't have to pay any admission if you say you're just going to the thrift store...
I've been to the City Museum several times, and I must say there is really no other place like it on earth. If anyone finds the museum lacking in content, I'd have to say that you're missing the point. The CM is all about interaction; you're not meant to just see everything in the plain sense, you're meant to climb, explore, and seek out the little hidden places tucked away all over the place. Almost everything about the place is entirely free-form, and that's part of the thrill. If you find that the place only satisfies curiosity for about an hour, well then I bet you're probably a pretty boring person that's way too grown up for their own good.
Meanwhile, it's so refreshing to see a place disregard all of the idiot tags we're so used to seeing everyday. Given that 99.999% of the population doesn't need to be told not to do stupid things, it's really that tiny fraction of people that makes everything always suck. The ones that make you wonder who the fuck would be stupid enough to eat the silicate pellet packs you find in new shoes, but also have the ability to read. The only place remotely similar to the CM where I live is so padded, safe, and banal by comparison. Yes, there is the risk of getting hurt in the CM, but the same thing is often true of places kids play. Even a simple jungle gym can result in a broken bone (as it did with me in the 3rd grade), but the point is to not generate boring people by sacrificing a fun life for complete and utter safety. Learning how to deal with potentially dangerous environments, yet still enjoy yourself, should be a crucial part of any kids upbringing. You have to use common sense to NOT INTENTIONALLY PUT YOUR FINGERS OR BODY IN A GIGANTIC MOVING METAL DEVICE. You shouldn't need a sign explaining why this is a bad idea. Nowhere in the CM will you find spots where good old fashioned common sense will keep you from getting hurt, and at the very least are no more risky that other theme parks/playgrounds.
Major advances have been made in real-time rendering previews and game engines, but you'll notice the more you actually get your hands on these that they can't currently do anything too complex.
The scenes demoed on their website use simple light sources with what appears to be a little bit of ambient occlusion. It's immediately noticeable that the geometry is low poly, and that the texture maps are procedural and tiled. Impressive for sure to be done in real-time, even though I'm not sure what amazing hardware you'd need to perform such a task, but not quite "cinematic quality" anyways.
. Let's see some real-time full scale global illumination, sub surface scattering, high resolution displacement, convincing reflections and refractions, etc. all done on some complex geometry at a decent resolution with some anti-aliasing before we make such a statement. Even though the bar is being raised for realistic visuals in computer games, that bar is also being raised in CGI for films...
You're missing the point.
The fact that most of our geniuses of yore tend to be white males is an implicit statement about the political climate of the time. Why weren't there any female or black masters in the classical era of Western music?
The same logic applies to video games, and the generic bald white space marine. While a game may not be intentionally political, that doesn't mean that we can't glean political information about the time and place these games are made.
Digital manipulation using Photoshop and the like is nothing like the studio effects you mention.
Whether you want to admit it or not, you're talking about environmental changes to the subject - lighting, color cast, exposure, etc.., not physical changes. You're not grasping the difference between an illusion, such as painting a room white to make it appear larger, and physical manipulation, such as moving your walls five feet out to increase your square footage.
Everyone expects that a good photographer will capture their subjects in the best light and color, along with manipulating the subject matter to get the best possible facial expression, etc. These are the basic elements of portrait photography, and have been for a long time. It's still a far cry from going in and giving your subject a digital nose job, increasing their bust size, slimming their waist and thighs, and stretching their torso. No amount of bounce lighting is going to achieve those things.
Well I'd say the first thing is that they have names like Microsoft, Nintendo, and EA, and the second thing is that they like to maximize a profit for the risk they take on developing, manufacturing, and marketing a product, but you're probably right. I'm definitely not initiated enough to understand such confusing and arcane subject matter as the logic behind making more of a type of thing that has sold a lot before, and allowing a product to retail through your distribution channel that has a reasonable expectation to sell. I didn't know that big media worked to promote the erudite musings of talented and rugged individuals, regardless of credentials, content, or market forces, not shovel out more of whatever sells the most copies at Wal-Mart, so thanks for clearing that up. I also didn't know that all you need to "level the playing field", as an indie games developer, is a good idea, magical "free time and money", and to get your shitty no-budget game posted up in some backwater realm of the internet. Maybe if you're lucky, some naive kid will do your texture work for free because they think it'll look good in their demo reel, or by the time you're sixty all of your hard work will have paid off enough to hire another person onto your team, or actually pay for some advertising. There's no such thing as market manipulation from above or barriers to entry, especially in the console market, right?
I think it's you that doesn't know the first thing about American capitalism and reiterates the same tired idea that all you need to make in this world is a healthy dose of determination, and that the people that don't overcome the inequalities and barriers to education and success dealt to them really only have themselves to blame.
Late response, but you didn't address what I said at all. Perhaps you should before you deem me "full of shit" and yourself "enlightening".
It's not just about women being buxom and curvaceous, but women being allowed to be "unattractive", yet still serve a role in the storyline of a game. Men vital to a story or environment are commonly portrayed as being ugly, while women, even those realistically portrayed physically, are not. Supporting roles, or plot points needing to be fleshed out are disproportionately handled by men, which contributes to the exaggeration of femininity in females due to their rarer occurrence (something that also commonly effects racial stereotypes in the games and media). Almost all of the games you mention contain far more men than women, giving the male sex much more room for variety through raw statistics in addition to male-centric game design.
One single example? Let's take a look at some example from your list a little closer. GTA IV (there are so many ugly men here I don't really need to name them, you're ignoring that Vice City is a perfect example of what you're trying to prove doesn't exist, and almost all the women you encounter, in all of the games, are a different story...), The Orange Box (compare Barney, Dr. Vance, Dr. Kleiner, Dr. Breen, the G-man, and many TF2 characters, to the few important female characters Alyx, Dr. Mossmann, and Chell. Even Valve's realistic portryal of these individuals doesn't mask the fact that the women are undeniably and intentionally more attractive for their age, compared to the men, who are allowed to be ugly for the sake of character. To my knowledge, Half Life 1 didn't contain any female characters, except for those sexy assassin things...), Street Fighter (E. Honda. do I really need to go on?), MGSIV (haven't played this one, but old snake isn't exactly going to win any beauty pagents, along with Psycho Mantis and Revelover Ocelot from the previous games. I do remember a "Sniper Wolf" with huge cleavage, however. Meryl was undeniably calendar girl worthy.), etc, etc. Women are given character AFTER they are established as an attractive human. Your list also excludes many historical big sellers, such as the many, many sports titles (plenty of realistic portrayal of homely men, sorry girls but you're stuck with Dead or Alive beach volleyball), and, yes all of those big selling Mario games. Also important are the countless cookie cutter genre games, whose portrayal of stereotypes are often stronger due to lower, eh, production values. Yes, many of the games you mentioned do contain muscled male stereotypes or attractive men, but they ALSO contain many males that don't fit into those trappings, which was my point. Games have plenty of unattractive men, and very rarely, by comparison, will you see an unattractive woman. This is what leads people to claim that female images are misrepresented in video games.
Finally, I think I'll expound on Samus, because she is the perfect example of what I'm talking about. You've probably played Super Smash Bros Brawl, where one of the playable characters is "Zero Suit Samus", basically Samus without her Power Armor. Lo and behold, we find a curvaceous buxom blond beneath the suit, reassuring us that even though we usually can't see the figure of Samus through her Power Armor, rest assured that she is hot...
I'll admit that RPG are usually a little more friendly towards female bodies that the other genres women are portrayed in, but you're still missing the point. All of the adult females in FFVI are portrayed as being attractive (in supporting art materials as well, I might add), in contrast with plenty of important unattractive male characters throughout the game, including the most powerful character in the game, Kefka. Besides that, have you played any of the FF games recently? Do I really need to remind you that FFXII contained a playboy bunny, complete with stilettos and a thong (even in the snowy mountains), as a main character? Ever hear of a game called FFX-2? Alter
We should never ever as a society condone people that don't "understand the why and wherefore" to have guns, badges, and the authority to beat your ass and get away with it. The fault lies with everyone involved in proportion to their involvement, in any situation in which your right are being removed (by being arrested, for example).
It's called personal responsibility, and you should have it no matter what your job is, or how many guns you're allowed to carry.
Right...care to back any of your "bitching" up with some evidence? Games are absolutely teeming with unchiseled, unattractive men. They take the forms of villians, NPC's, and very often, player characters. Just compare Mario and Peach, for starters. Men are the only sex allowed to have diversity in video games. Females, even strong females such as Samus Aran or Lara Croft have to be buxom curvacious stereotypes, and at the very least attractive. Can you even name ONE adult female player character off the top of your head that doesn't fit this mold (must be human and not created by the player, sorry)? Alyx Vance comes close, but isn't playable.
Right, so if minority groups just learned more at the public library, they too could be captains of industry! All they have to do first is learn, then they'll automatically get to own the huge media firms that decide what gets published. Amazing!
You're simple, yet elegant, solution has singlehandedly solved centuries of inequality and discrimination. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
Acting within you granted legal rights in not taking an "unassailable moral high ground". This is the first obvious problem, which is that people do not respect the legal status of bikers as traffic. If anything, you're assuming a moral high ground, by not treating fellow transports as equals. You have an impact on those around you as well, including bikers. We don't have a second class status on the road, and you don't get ambulatory priority just because you're in a car. You also have to keep in mind that the vulnerable party here, safety wise, are the bikers. This is why we often ride in ways that slow down traffic and increase our visibility. If you have a problem with bikers acting in ways to ensure their safety, than you really have a problem with the law, which grants equal access to the roads for bikes. As long as we are acting within our legal rights, we're not the ones at fault.
As long as the roads are to be used by everyone with equal right of access, including bikers, you're going to have to gain some patience.
Right...because it's their fault you've decided to have such a shitty drive home and homicidal tendencies? I'm not so sure that the problems here rest with bikers.
So what? Do you have the same indignation at speed bumps and stop signs? I don't bike because I think it's going to save the world, I do it because I prefer the experience to being cooped up in a car.
Nevertheless, for you comparison to be even remotely fair, you'd have to compare the total amount of energy wasted to get a person from point A to point B utilizing both methods of transportation. I'm no physicist, but I'm willing to bet the biker is going to come out on top in most circumstances.
Furthermore, you can easily invert the entire thrust of your argument. Stopping, starting, and traffic are an unavoidable fact of urban transportation. Bikes have an inherent engineering advantage when to remain idle requires little to no energy. It should be obvious, for a variety of reasons, that cars are not the most effective choice for such terrain.
While I wholeheartedly agree with your point, not all homebrew sucks, at least not for the DS...
Check out a program called Colors, which is a simple painting/sketching program which uses the touch interface. To my knowledge, the DS doesn't have this feature otherwise.
The DS is FAR easier to pirate gam...ahem..."run homebrew" for. All you have to do is plug a card into Slot 1 loaded with software. Really, that's it. There is no battery swapping, tiff expoiting crap to deal with. Also, most DS games are relatively tiny, compared to a UMD. Yet the DS has a million awesome games.
Because the PSP can do near PS2 quality games, there is a large onus to up the production value. Bigger budgets mean higher risk, and this is probably the real reason why the PSP is pretty barren.
Ok, do you mind if I shoot you in the head with this nail gun? Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you, I'm only going to change your skull. Also, great job on the ad hominem criticism, because we all know that only perfect people have valid things to say. Sure a lot of environmentalist hippies may have obvious hypocrisies, but you're an apologist, and that is much, much worse. Now that I think about it, I really can't see the difference between the environmental impact of posting on Slashdot and nuking the planet. It's all so clear now thanks to your amazing ontological semantics! Thanks!
You seemed to be missing a vital point so I'll spell it out for you - an argument favoring environmental or ecological initiative a over b due to personal or moral considerations can not immediately be inflated to an argument calling for the dismantling of all technology that effects the planet.
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible that some clean renewable source of energy could be harvested to power our Ipods, but I'll be darned if I can think of it! I guess we might as well stick to building aircraft carriers and mountaintop removal, because it's simply impossible that we could live any other way that the way we do right now, and besides it's not like we're fucking anything up. Just changing it, you know. By the way, how much research do you think a trillion bucks, about the estimated amount pissed down the drain in Iraq, would buy? Fuck it, let's get into that Alaskan wildlife reserve ASAP!
This is really misleading. The development of computer technology has been heavily subsidized by the government. The internet is a notorious example of public subsidy being handed over for private profit.
Even Bell Labs' transistor, the invention of the century, was heavily effected by the protection/subsidy of AT&T from on high. It was only due to the monopoly status AT&T enjoyed that it had the spare cash to maintain Bell Labs, and once AT&T lost this government protection, so too did Bell Labs shift away from it's scientific pursuits to more short term projects.
How exactly you think private companies have the right to charge us through the nose for technology developed either in part or fully by our own tax dollars is beyond me. When you say that "we paid for the R&D", that's more of a reason for it be cheaper for us, not less!
Why would I feel "just as much emotional impact" for tragedy stricken upon strangers? Nothing I said implies this, and you're pushing an extreme view upon me to apologize for a perceived callousness.
A person's emotional attachment to fellow human beings can be anything. People can care very deeply for people they've never met, and people can not give a damn about people they've known their whole life. I don't buy any arguments that claim some innate level of human empathy that serves as a standard upon which to judge yourself. These types of excuses are used notoriously to defend selfish, destructive, and apathetic behavior, and have been all throughout history. When it comes down to it, you are responsible for your own morals, so you only have yourself to blame if you find yourself offended that others see your lack of empathy as disturbing.
If people didn't care deeply for each other, including those that they've never met, we never would have come out of certain dark chapters of our collective history. Slavery is a good example. I'm sure you can think of others.
The implicit assumption behind all of your defense is that people can only really care about those that have a "connection" with them. While you can convince yourself of this, I don't need to have a series of information exchanging encounters with a person to sympathize with them as a fellow human.
If the world really operated this way, we'd certainly be a lot more fucked than we are right now. I would imagine most of us rational self-interested egoists are too busy burying those rogue emotions under paychecks and cheap rhetoric, however.
Right...whenever greed fueled economic catastrophe ruins the working class people will always claim it's their own fault for being too stupid. A lot more people than you think "survive" by doing without and still end up on the street.
Personally, I'd rather do something about the disgusting disparity of wealth and opportunity in our nation than see people stripped to a meager existence. Maybe predatory lending, not homeowner's cellphones, had something to do with this?
Yes, they're called corporations.